11:42pm June 29, 2014

➸ Another thing I can't stand in some communities that are supposedly about "justice."

amorpha-system:

amorpha-system:

People who start from the base assumption that the only kind of relationship that can ever exist between them and members of a more privileged group is one of mutual enmity. They literally don’t seem to know how to interact with people who do not approach them as enemies, if…

Yeah, I remember that woman who kept harassing you about the “DFAB does not equal trans man and not everyone who fits that label has male privilege” thing (if I’m remembering it correctly). It seemed like no matter what you said, she would turn everything all around so that everything you said was wrong and got spun as a sign of prejudice against trans women. I couldn’t even follow where she was going, it was just… it was like that thing you mentioned in another post, where this seems to be something you’re taught to do in academia, to argue for or against any position and change it on the spur of the moment, yet people who constantly use it will argue practically to the death that being able to do this is not a form of privilege in itself. (And we don’t deny that we were in academia at one point, but we ended up getting far away from classes that forced you to argue for/against various positions, as soon as we were done with our transfer requirements, because trying to force our brain to work that way was painful. We hit a wall at some of the math requirements for our never-completed geology degree, but they didn’t break our brain in that same way.)

The “claiming to be autistic is just something people say to avoid talking about white privilege” thing pisses us off partly because we have friends who are definitely autistic and definitely people of color or mixed race, and when they mention this fact in discussions, that autism is not a white rich kid thing, they just get TALKED OVER and ignored. It’s like they just get discarded when they contradict someone else’s theory or hangup and their experiences aren’t acknowledged at all.

Oh, and the other thing I’ve seen is communities where a few autistic men act creepy and sexually predatory towards women— not because they’re autistic, but because they’re creeps— and the women in the community use this to decide that autism is just an excuse men use to claim they can’t be expected to respect women’s boundaries or not assault them, start rolling their eyes whenever anyone brings it up, etc. And again, autistic women, if they dare to speak up in that kind of climate, just get ignored at best.

-S.

I apparently managed to miss the thing that Mel was talking about. That may have happened when I was taking a break from Tumblr, or I may have just missed it. But, I wish I were surprised. :(

But, when I was reading the description of that, I couldn’t help but think of the other example addressed at the end, on my own: the excuse for actual predatory creepers thing. (Like those two categories of people are somehow mutually exclusive, in the first place. *sigh*) Those cases do sound like variations on the same ableist theme.

It’s like they just get discarded when they contradict someone else’s theory or hangup and their experiences aren’t acknowledged at all.

Exactly. This seems to happen with so many things. And some people are going to hear whatever it is that they are expecting to hear, regardless of what you are actually saying. I haven’t watched it in that particular scenario (yet :-|), which is actually a bit surprising, what with definitely not being some kind of stereotypical spoiled White boy myself. Looking for excuses for lousy behavior, or otherwise. But that general pattern happens way too much, and it can be so frustrating.

The thing I was talking about wasn’t the one Amorpha mentioned up there. It was the thing where you’d reblogged a thing by a trans woman talking about gender and femininity, and I and Anne and allies-person all responded to it talking about gender and femininity and our experiences as… two genderless people and a cis woman, basically. And thread drift happened a good deal, so we weren’t even discussing the original topic anymore. And the original poster turned out to be a trans woman (I’d assumed it was a cis woman for some reason, and the original post gave no indication that it was about transmisogyny) who took us all to task for interfering with trans women discussing transmisogyny. And then after that I became “that person who interferes with trans women discussing transmisogyny” even though this thing only happened once and there was like… no indication whatsoever that this was the topic or that it was supposed to be closed to trans women only, or even that the OP was a trans woman. And then she later showed up in a totally unrelated thread to tell people not to listen to me about the FWD Ableist Word Profiles because I “used language to hurt trans women” which was made into sounding like a habitual thing, rather than this one-time thing that happened by accident. The weirdest thing is we all ended up apologizing and recognizing that we shouldn’t have been in the initial discussion, but that wasn’t good enough, because anything short of not having been there in the first place meant we were awful people, and especially I was an awful person, and it was just weird. Like I’m not a mind reader, I can’t tell what’s a “space” (that’s the word they used, “spaces”) designated for a group of people, unless it’s marked in some way, and simply discussing gender and femininity is not enough to tell me whose “space” it is and whether I’m welcome there, because lots of people discuss that. (And even when trans women discuss it, some trans women welcome discussion from other trans people and others don’t, so even that isn’t clear unless you actively say it.)

Notes: